You Aren't Failing. The Industry is Failing You.

When I started Scene Change, I thought I’d be talking to people who wanted out.

Burned out. Done. Ready to shut the door on the whole thing and walk away. That’s not who showed up. Most of the people I coach love the work and are very good at it. Mid-career. Deep resumes. The kind of people who have run rooms and delivered under pressure that would flatten most corporate lifers on contact. They are not looking for permission to quit.

They’re looking for a way to keep going that doesn’t cost them everything.

That people wanted to leave was the assumption, and I’m not proud of where it came from—it came from me. That was my story, so I figured it was everyone’s. But I missed the most real, vulnerable, and important through-line of my own pivot that only surfaces when I’m really honest with myself.

I only felt solid about my exit once I’d already objectively succeeded.

I’d been established as one of the strongest Production Managers in Canadian reality TV. I was turning down jobs to travel and had no worries about whether I’d be able to pick up a solid contract when I was ready to return. People were starting to float potential line producer opportunities at me. So I looked hard at the line producers I knew, and at close friends who’d been in the business a long time, and I thought: This isn’t the life I want. I don’t want it. I want something else.

But I needed to be standing on that ledge—clearly capable of the next rung—before I could walk away without it reading as failure inside my own head. I had succeeded past my own measures and everyone else’s, and then I chose to leave. There was no version of the story where I hadn’t made it. I knew nobody I worked with would say that. I knew that there was no angle I could spin to myself either.

My alibi was rock solid—I had chosen to leave. I hadn’t given up. And I certainly hadn’t failed.

There’s a narrative in creative work that doesn’t really exist anywhere else: you either make it or you don’t.

You have to be a little crazy to go for this career. You have to want it more than stability, more than sleep, more than money. And the reward for wanting it that badly is that you get to stay. Staying is winning. Leaving is losing. Leaving means you weren’t cut out for it. Leaving means you weren’t passionate enough.

Nobody talks like this in other industries. Nobody tells a junior accountant they have to be a little unhinged to want the job. (Ok, but we can probably all agree that production accountants are some of the most unhinged people you’ll ever meet in your life.) And nobody frames someone moving from accounting at a bank, to say, a tech company as a failure of nerve. It’s a career. A strategic move. Industries change, people move, that’s the whole deal.

But in creative streams, doing anything else is giving up. Even having a “day job” to help pay the bills is looked down on—you’re not fully in it. You haven’t sacrificed enough.

That framing gets hammered into you from the first unpaid gig. Be grateful you’re here. Plenty of people would kill for this. There’s a lineup around the block to replace you tomorrow. Don’t complain about the hours—this is what you signed up for. By the time you’re mid-career, it isn’t an external message anymore. It’s the voice in your own head.

If I were still in the industry right now, more accomplished than I was when I actually left, but watching the ground slip out from under it the way it’s slipping now, I think I’d have a much harder time feeling confident about my little narrative of resolve.

You have to let go of the make-it-or-fail narrative. Not because it’s inconvenient— because it is so completely, obviously, and obscenely inaccurate.

You have not failed in this industry. The industry has failed you.

And this is a pattern of thought that will keep surfacing, because it’s been running in the background for years. You catch it and correct it, and it comes back, and you catch it again.

It’s the flinch when someone asks what you’re doing now, and you brace for the small involuntary downgrade in their eyes when you tell them you’re studying for your PMP and not in it anymore. It’s the urge to tack on but I still love the industry so nobody thinks you’re bitter. It’s the way you describe a genuinely good, sustainable, well-paid new direction as a consolation prize. A Plan B. Because Plan A was supposed to be forever.

None of that is true. It just feels true, because this industry spent years making sure it would. Even fully on the other side of it, I still catch myself in this thought pattern when I talk about my own pivot.

Unlearning it means noticing when the old voice shows up and saying the plain version instead: I’m looking into other options because my skills are worth more elsewhere. Without softening it into an apology—to other people, but mostly to yourself. Someone else’s discomfort with your choice, especially someone still inside it, is not yours to manage. Your clarity just makes them do their own math, and that’s their business, not yours.

What’s actually infront of you is a definition of a thriving career that isn’t borrowed from an industry that couldn’t afford to keep you.

When the math stops working—when the passion is still there but the paycheque isn’t, when you love the work but don’t like your life on it—the reflex is to think I failed.

You didn’t.

You’ve seen the evidence, probably on the same platform that brought you to Scene Change. People are taking jobs under pseudonyms because they need to pay rent and it’s a non-union gigs. People who used to get booked months out, who used to field ten offers at a time, are now grateful for one. Some of the most top-tier people in their field are sitting on their hands. The existence of Scene Change is itself a piece of evidence.

This is something happening to an industry. It is not something happening to you because you weren’t good enough. Or didn’t want it enough. Or didn’t work hard enough.

The skills you built are not unique to entertainment. The pressure you learned to work under. The chaos you learned to organize. The way you lead and influence with no formal hierarchy to back you up and deliver anyway when nothing is certain. Those don’t stay behind if you leave. Most industries are desperate for exactly this and don’t even know what to call it, because they didn’t cut their teeth in an environment that forges it.

But you cannot carry those skills (and your confidence in them) through the door while you’re still dragging the old story about what your career means. Those two things don’t fit through the frame at the same time.

So keep the passion. Keep the craft, the standards, the pride, the memory, all the parts you loved. Those are yours and they’re worth keeping. Just put down the part that says exploring other things makes you a failure. You were failed by a system that ran on your love and gave you nothing durable back.

Recognizing that isn’t bitterness. It’s the first honest thing anyone in this business has said in years. And learning to sit with it is the only place a real next chapter starts—whatever that chapter turns out to be.

Scene Change is here for that part. Whether you’re actively looking to leave, quietly stuck, or just trying to figure out what’s next, I built it for the whole range of that—not just the exit.

Now. Shoulders back. Head up. Repeat after me: I’m looking into other options because my skills are worth more elsewhere.

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Substack has introduced a feature that lets you scan for AI-generated content. I had an existential crisis back in January when I learned that the core concept I built Scene Change on is a hallmark AI tell. Read the article I wrote then to learn more about how I do and don’t use AI at Scene Change and who gets disproportionately impacted when these “AI detector” tools decide what’s real and what’s fake.